What do you like best?

There’s probably more power under the hood than I’m aware of. I wouldn’t know because our org has our roles pretty well locked down and our consultants have pretty well taken over the global stylesheets and templates and make it difficult to work within the environment.

What do you dislike?

- The UI of the site is hard to sort through. Buttons are inconsistently or oddly labeled and often not in a predictable location. The design looks outdated and patched together: the teal-and-bright-green of the front page icons doesn't cohere with the bright blue logo, the dull navy navbar and the various color tints used throughout the site.

- Many of the features used for template development are outdated/unnecessary in modern web / email design (body tag attributes? in 2017?).

- The WYSIWYG editor used for text formatting in emails and web page builders is *several dozen versions* behind. Code appropriate to modern browsers is best done by hand, which makes it much less useful for non-coder users and means I have to go behind them and clean up their WYSIWYG code.

- According to our production manager, pulling reports and updating lists is a painful experience.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Make sure you implement it correctly and have people who know what they're doing using it and controlling the implementation process. Don't rely on consultants.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We run email campaigns and newsletters, and some donations, through Luminate and are in the process of pulling some CRM functions into it related to another product. (Obviously my team was not given right of veto.)

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What do you like best?

Luminate Online is a good tool for organizations that want to be able to customize the information they can see and query about their contacts/donors. It is easy to navigate and there are a lot of helpful resources if needed.

What do you dislike?

One negative about this system is in regards to creating reports. It comes with standard reports but we often need to create our own in order to be able to pull all the needed fields. For example there is a standard report of donations and households but we also need it to pull fields from contacts so we made our own.

Recommendations to others considering the product

I have not handled many other databases at the same length of which I've used Luminate so it's hard to say which would be best but I do recommend it. There are definitely other CRMs that are clunkier and with any system there will be things you love and things you find lacking.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are solving the issue of needing a clear way to organize and view donor information and be able to track it as needed. Benefits realized are no longer having any shadow databases that may live offline or in employees personal drives. All information can be accessed in one place.

What do you like best?

Luminate Online meets very basic needs. They are able to accommodate some particular things to our organization, like including premiums on our donation forms or the ability to schedule to unpublish and redirect a donation form. I like that they have chat support.

What do you dislike?

So many things. Support is lacking. It is so complex to build in their system- for example, just creating a stationary needs to be done in a very specific complicated way. They rolled out a tweet your rep tool that needs so much work and fixing to be even usable. There are lots of little things that annoy me, too- like how it logs you out all the time, or how the WYZYWG breaks everything, or how you can only upload one image at a time. Their surveys are completely non-mobile responsive and require the most gigantic headache to build. Advocacy: there is no click to call and lots of delivery failures. Social sharing is not integrated. I could go on.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

I like how donation transaction pages, emails, and transaction history are all on one platform. It easy to navigate through the portal and see how everything intertwines with each other. It is also great that it is compatible with Raiser's Edge and it easy to output and input donor data information. You are able to pull donor giving reports. You are able to create and track emails. And you are able to create donation pages that work with your organization's website.

What do you dislike?

The email platform is very finicky. It sometimes takes a long time to get a simple email created. While in mail chip it is easy to move text and picture block around, it is not that easy in Luminate. The options that are available for fonts are very little and making edits is very touchy as well. If you don't make separate tables for everything, it kind of all gets bundled together.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

An online platform that houses donor data that we can easily pull reports from. They do a good job providing a lot of ways we can capture donor data whether it is transactional data, email opens/clicks, what campaigns they are answering to and bio information.

What do you like best?

After years of toiling through LyrisHQ, etc., the integrated features of Luminate make it easy for a one-person marketing department to seamlessly manage development and e-mail campaigns.

What do you dislike?

I wish the dashboard were a little more intuitive at times.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Luminate offers helpful applications to fully staffed marketing departments and small non-profit staff alike. Because it's a Blackbaud product, it's incredibly helpful for e-commerce use, and the e-mail/form campaigns are easy to develop and use.

Just a pro-tip for those less accustomed to such intensive software: do make sure to complete each of the form/campaign trainings - it's more user friendly if you have a level of comfort with more technical platforms (e.g., the polar opposite of something like, say, Constant Contact, which relies strictly on visual editors).

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We're better able to segment our campaigns, both fundraising and e-mail, on one singular platform.

What do you like best?

It has many features including things like auto-login when donors click on a link. It's relatively easy to use. and was a stable platform. It did allow us to increase our online donation results. It has some good tools for reporting on email campaigns and their results, who donated to what projects based on the emails we sent them. They were able to work with our existing payment gateways which made setting up payments easy and did not cause us to incur any other fees with implantation.

What do you dislike?

Integration with our internal systems was not great. It was sometimes difficult to get data out of the system and EFT recurring payments were inconsistent. The email creation tools are there but by and large they are more for people with some type of HTML background. We replaced their email functionality with ActOn and it is a much better "non-technical" platform for email generation/deployment.

We switched out to a software package that more completely integrates in with our internal software.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If this will be your primary mechanism for taking donations it's pretty good. Most of our issues revolved around integrating it in with our internal donor management software.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We used it for an on line donation portal and for email marketing. As a tool it did accomplish the goals that we had. However the software itself was clunky and didn't have the finesse of some other platforms.

Essentially it was software designed by engineers without the assistance of UI specialist.

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